The roots of religion are probably lost in the mists of time. Today,
in a world in great parts understood by science, its main purpose is respective
should be a guideline for common perceptions of values, often called ethics.

However, the long history shows many nasty faces of all sorts of religious
fanatism in nearly every religion with a recognizable number of members.

Among the best known examples were the conflict between ancient Egyptians
and the Jewish, Romans and the first Christians, in the Middle Ages the
totally superfluous crusades and the barbarism called inquisition by terroristic
catholics and more recently crippling, torturing and murdering by Islamist
terrorists for example in Iran or Algeria.

And this is the worst, which comes out of religions: a behaviour, which
denies all human rights and therefore perverts all the sense in it. This
religious motivated malevolence often even surpasses such created by dictators
like Milosevic, Hussein or the collective group of dictators in Beijing,
who do this because of personal desire for power and influence.

less violent offendings of freedom

But also less evident attacks against rights of individuals occur even
in countries, which guarantee the human rights - by the way, these countries
are even today a minority of a few dozens, compared with the around 200
represented in the United Nations.

The newest example comes out of the Catholic church, which is today,
as it was since the Middle Ages, some sort of internal dictatorship, of
course with the pope as "Catholic Dictator".

Most of the popes therefore regularly abuse their position for suppressing
any not identical opinions in the church, mainly by the so-called "Encyclica",
which claim absolute truth and absence of any error in values.

But also more sublime manipulations and orders can cause harm among
individuals: the youngest initiative of the pope to fight again all means
of birth control will only pose even greater unsafety for the affected
women.

intolerance of the Catholic Church

This is part of a more general suppressing style against women, who
are clearly considered as humans of second class, not allowed to take any
official position in the pope directed church, not allowed to marry any
man, who holds such a position and in the popes opinion only potential
killers, who try to destroy any new life within them - what a bad joke,
because nearly all - at least all sound women - love children very much
and will never destroy their life without any major problem, which they
can't manage. There are plenty of women, which aborted a pregnancy and
got by this big psychic problems: often a major guilt trap. You can be
sure, no sound woman will abort a pregnancy without any doubt - but if
you hear the pope speak about this, you can see a major lack of realism
in his speech.

All over the world conflicts between diverse groups are boiling - the
religious fanatism is often an important ingredient of these. One good
example is Northern Ireland, where only slight religious differences cause
an incredible bloodshed - and even with additional economical reasons,
which play also a role, the irrational aspect is mainly religious. The
political differences are only a superficial sign of these problems.

a global aspect

Apart from personal tragedies, strengthened by this "Dinosaur pope",
this is also very dangerous for the entire mankind. We are today confronted
with different big problems like global warming, toxic waste all over the
world, growing dangers of nuclear conflicts (remember India and Pakistan)
and so on. Among them is the explosive growth of populations especially
in Africa, parts of Asia and Latin America, and the least thing we need,
is to face the global trial of some fossil like Woijtila, to deny all effective
means of limiting this danger of population growth. The only hopes are,
that many Catholics will despite this ignore these orders and that biology
will solve this problem finally in the next few years with respect to the
pope himself.